1981: B News & Rapid Expansion

B News was written by Mark
Horton, then a graduate student at Cal Berkeley, and Matt
Glickman, a high school student. Horton identified and conceived of
solutions for the limitations of A News, but had limited time to create
a working program. Glickman was on spring break at the time and wanted
to occupy his time with a computer project, which led to his consulting
with Mark Horton. The first B News code was written by Glickman and
formally announced at the Usenix conference in winter of 1982.

A News was designed with the notion that users could read all of the
content on Usenet in one sitting. The explosive popularity of Usenet
quickly put that to rest, and major changes to the news software were
necessary. Some of the critical changes introduced with B News included
an all-new article format, modifications to article storage, an article
expiration function, and a history database for individual readers
on a Usenet site. These modifications allowed users to subscribe to
specific newsgroups, retain articles for a specific amount of time,
skip unwanted articles, track previously read articles, and resume
sessions from the last article read.

Prior to B News, Mark Horton also facilitated one of the most important
non-technical achievements for Usenet. The UC-Berkeley campus was an
official Arpanet node, so when Horton joined the Usenet network he
began forwarding Arpanet mailing lists to Usenet newsgroups. This move
greatly enhanced Usenet's visibility and further enticed administrators
to join the network.

Development of B News was passed on to
Rick Adams in 1983. Critical
additions Adams made to B News included support for control messages
to automate newsgroup and article management, and early support for
moderated newsgroups.

Like Mark Horton, Rick Adams' contribution to Usenet went beyond
B News. Non-Arpanet Usenet sites exchanged data by dialing one
another at regular intervals, an expensive process which was paid
for mostly by honest cooperation. Adams envisioned providing Usenet
feeds commercially to ease the burden placed on large-scale Usenet
sites. In 1987, Adams received a loan from the Usenix organization
and founded UUNET as a non-profit company. UUNET proved extremely
successful, allowing Adams to pay back the loan from Usenix and shed
UUNET's non-profit status within two years. UUNET would eventually
become much more than a Usenet provider. In the early 1990s UUNET
began offering commercial access to a privately-owned IP backbone,
making it one of the very first ISPs. Today, UUNET remains one of
the top-tier internet networks.

Rick Adams maintained B News until 1989, when he officially declared
the software obsolete. Enthusiasts would continue modifying B News for
a few years, but the software was swiftly superseded by
C News and the rise of
NNTP.